True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans Are Creating a Time-Rich,Ecologically Light,Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy

We will not arrest ecological decline or regain financial health without also introducing a different rhythm of work, consumption, and daily life, as well as alterations in a number of system-wide structures. We need an alternative economy, not just an alternative energy system.

World Institute for Development Economics Research, in the late 1980s, for a project whose core question was how the macro-economy would differ if we were to take ecological limits seriously.

GDP measures only marketed activity. It leaves out reductions in the stocks of natural capital. It ignores changes in leisure time. If air pollution is impairing the health of a population, it counts their medical expenditures as an addition, but fails to add a corresponding negative tally for their deteriorating health status.

neighbors could share expensive items that are only used periodically, such as riding mowers.

For cell phones, computer products, and televisions together, 373 million, or about 1.2 per American, arrived at EOL in 2007.

“This is not a product-based program, it’s knowledge-based.” Rather than purchasing fertilizers and pesticides, the caretakers learned about nitrogen cycling

Center for a New American Dream, a nonprofit devoted to making American lifestyles socially and ecologically sustainable.

These, then, are the individual principles of plenitude: work and spend less, create and connect more. In turn they yield ecological benefits—emit and degrade less—and human ones—enjoy and thrive more.

In economic terms, these gains are equivalent to a reduction in the price of energy, because they yield a given level of energy services with less fuel. The rebound effect occurs when that lower price induces consumers to buy more energy, which in turn partly or wholly cancels out the engineering improvements.

The simplifiers’ footprint was almost a quarter (23 percent) lower than among a random matched sample. (The simple livers also reported significantly higher well-being than the random sample.)